“Terrorize some more golden faeries?” His lack of response and the flattening of his features were confirmation enough. I scooted over the bed, my tone sugar with a bite of venom. “Tell me again, my beastly warrior, what exactly have these poor creatures done to you? Not to your king,” I said when he opened his mouth, “but to you?”

Unable to answer, perhaps unwilling to acknowledge even to himself that whatever reason he had wasn’t something he entirely agreed with, his jaw clenched. “I’d rather we don’t talk of such things.” Attempting to veer from the subject, and nearly succeeding, his eye gleamed as he rumbled, “Still wearing me.”

I was indeed still too fond of his tunic. I smiled. “Peering into those shadowed corners does nothing good for the guilt, does it?”

“Not sure what you mean.” He dumped his dagger upon the nightstand, as well as some coins. “Guilt and I steer well clear of one another. Besides, few people died today. We even brought some back.”

“To interrogate?”

Scythe huffed. “They surrendered. They’ll now be set up with housing here in Vordane.”

I failed to mask my surprise. “What is the point of this vengeance upon Sinshell if you’re not slaughtering them all?”

“To take it all, wildflower, everything they hold dear,” he said, cold and plain. “The way they did us.”

Those words. I had to wonder if, in the end, it was always the same—a ruler’s desire for bloodshed.

Sitting up, I studied Scythe with a tilt of my head.

He lifted a brow, endlessly patient while he waited to see what I was up to.

I hooked my finger, beckoning him closer.

He narrowed his eye, but the intensity of his features gradually melted as he stripped out of his tunic and pants. Stoic and hard, his entire physique mouthwateringly impressive, he stood naked before the bed. “What do you need?”

He wasn’t expecting it, so it thrilled me to say, “I need you to change for me.”

He frowned. “To shift?” At my nod, surprise lit his eye. “You’ve never seen fae in beast form before?”

“I have,” I said, and numerous times at that. “But I’ve never seen you.”

He blinked. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I want to see you.” I crawled to the edge of the bed when he expelled a rough breath. “You cannot scare me, wolf.”

He smirked.

A heartbeat later, he reformed before my very eyes. In tendrils of shadow and warping, cracked movements, the male who’d found me in the dark tavern a handful of nights ago disappeared.

Standing in his place, his muzzle reaching my head and his body blocking the doorway of the bedchamber, was a giant black wolf.

The scar, his missing eye, and the violent green of the other were all that remained unchanged, as well as the fast beating tempo of his heart.